Tuesday 8 August 2017

Repurposing an old Eee netbook for research

A long time ago, when I upgraded my EEE pc to crunchbang (which is no longer maintained), one of my ideas was to use it as a distraction free writing machine.

Having fiddled about with cherrytree as a note manager, I’ve come to the conclusion that using machine as a distraction free research machine works:

It has an excellent, if slightly cramped keyboard, will run for a couple of hours without being plugged in to the wall, and with focuswriter for writing, and cherrytree for notes management, as well as something like retext or gedit for markdown work, and kate (or gedit) for general text file editing, the whole bundle works well, especially with opera as browser (for some reason it works better than Firefox or Chromium, coping with the EEE’s non standard screen size), and sylpheed as a mail client - not my favourite, but sufficiently lightweight to run quickly.

As before, no dropbox or other external storage - things are kept as minimal as possible.

The result?

A distraction free research machine with just enough connectivity to check items, but without all the booming buzzing confusion that a more fully specified machine would lead you into. That and its small form factor makes it highly portable

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